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NOTE Historians and the Welfare-Warfare State

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Sometimes I'd be giving a lecture and at the appropriate point he would say that he was now ripping off his value-free mask.

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A mask of very high height and I think we're sort of getting to that point here.

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This topic, Historians of the Welfare Warfare State, actually reveals the dialectical cleverness of the Mises Institute.

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If you'll notice, the first talk this morning was about the welfare of the state,

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then we had one about the warfare state, and now we have the higher synthesis.

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So we're reaching the Hegelian moment with this talk.

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So I admit it'll be a little bit stream of consciousness and bibliography, but nonetheless,

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the phrase welfare, warfare, state, as far as I know, was invented,

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it was certainly popularized by Murray Rothbard, and as far as I know,

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...first appears in a prize book edited by the Great Society Reader,

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and Rothbard contributed a libertarian critique of the Great Society to that mostly New Left book,

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and laid out this concept of the welfare warfare state.

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And this is a very useful term because it bypasses some of the usual ideological mystification.

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In other words, people who think of the state as a genial, sort of friendly society just handing out soup and other goodies sometimes like the state in that aspect and they think the wars are accidental or unrelated to the state and people that like the wars and don't like the welfare can be sold the whole program or that part of the program and so this breaks up

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about potential opposition or endorsement of the state and kind of left and right constituencies.

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So to go back to my chart from the other day about possible combinations of political economy and foreign policy,

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I now am willing to reveal that this is us and them.

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So these are all the statists who believe in empire and a large state at home.

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These are the laissez-faire liberals.

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The laissez-faire liberals who talk a good game of the free market and then support the empire,

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which I've argued is not a stable position.

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So this is the national review position circa 1960,

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whereas the national review position today is somewhere over in here,

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in this big statist morass that runs from the neocons over to the unrepentant Stalinists.

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Down here we have the autarkic socialists, the sort of nadir people who don't want to trade with anybody

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with anybody because they're afraid it leads to complications, and sometimes war, so the best we can say for them is that sometimes they're critics of the welfare warfare state because the welfare warfare state is located here, these are the consistent apologists for this, okay, and some of these right-wingers during the Cold War used to criticize the welfare part but not the warfare part which they loved, and some of the anarchic, or some of the socialists within this

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within this coalition, well, they pretty much endorse the whole thing.

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These socialists, and here we might put William Mapp and Williams, and Charles Baird is sort of a target corporatist thinker,

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are able to see both sides of the coin and be critics.

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So these two groups can be critics of the welfare-warfare state.

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Okay. Now, among the few exceptions, of course, to the general right-wing position in the Cold War was Murray Rothbard, who didn't like the welfare or the war affair.

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He had this admirable consistency, which he shared with just a few other people.

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Arthur E. Kirch might be mentioned, who was a classical liberal historian of the period, did a number of general books,

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The most famous of which is The Decline of American Liberalism, noticing these connections between...

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He also had a very good essay on progressivism in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, sometime around 1979 on the character of the progressive era as being statist in all areas.

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Okay. Now, in Rothbard's analysis, he proceeded from what you might call the classical liberal exploitation theory,

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the theory that when the state's doing something, there is plunder involved somewhere,

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and you just have to find out how the plunder is working.

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And this derived from the analysis of people like Cobden and Bright, Bastiat, John C. Calhoun, Franz Oppenheimer,

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all people who thought there was something fishy about the state taking money from people

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So I want to proceed somewhat chronologically, actually I was looking through Hesiod, I was hoping that Hesiod around the 8th century B.C. had discovered this problem, but I couldn't find anything.

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So we'll start with John Bright and I'll proceed chronologically and bring the critics in as they criticize.

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John Bright made a famous comment.

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Now you have to understand that in Britain they had what was called indoor relief and outdoor relief.

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Indoor relief was they put you in this terrible workhouse and made you work.

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So it's kind of like a Republican work fair, but about 40 times meaner.

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And the other form of outdoor relief was when they didn't make you move into the workhouse

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and they just gave you some subsidy of some kind.

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And Bright famously said that the entire British Empire was a vast system of outdoor relief

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Your Relief for the Landed Gentry, so there's some welfare there, but it's welfare for the Landed class.

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It's paradoxical in a way to associate warfare and welfare together because you would think

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welfare in principle would just be what benefits people so then you might have the free market and achieve welfare.

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And warfare in general seems to be kind of bad.

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Doesn't seem like it's much fun for anybody except the generals and the defense contractors.

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But nonetheless, this is the problem we have to look at.

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Now, I'm going to define welfare very vaguely as sort of any handout that comes from the government to anybody.

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This could be welfare for corporations, farmers, urban poor, all sorts of rabble, middle class entitlements and so forth.

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but this is all expanded along with the warfare state and some of this is military pensions the more people you have fighting wars the more pensions you have to pay later and so on and with the growth of popular democracy there's more of a need to include a larger body of the population in the welfare side of the warfare state so they remain loyal and committed to the system we see this all through World War one the politicians as I mentioned the other day running on the platform

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of Better Houses for Britons, Better Pensions, and the Germans will pay for it, out of the reparations, so that was one approach.

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Women's suffrage was suddenly discovered to be absolutely essential during World War I also, various things like this, it may or may not have been, we won't debate the merits.

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Okay, so for a larger overview of the whole process, I can recommend a couple of books.

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There is, of course, Bruce Porter. I'll just write the names. I have a bibliography of most of this.

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Bruce Porter, War and the Rise of the State. This is about 1994.

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It covers much of the same ground as Martin Van Creufelde in his book, I guess it's A Rise and Decline of the State.

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Oh, again, some of us are skeptical about the decline part, and this is about 1999.

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And I think we could mention our very own Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, showing how at certain critical episodes the state has taken advantage of the situation to grow,

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which is one of the things that states do.

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Okay, so now we have Robert Higgs.

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The year escapes me, but maybe someone knows.

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Anyway, recently.

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Okay, we can ask the author.

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And so there's a number of books that do see this relationship

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between the warfare and the will-fare in a systematic way.

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Now, there are some 19th century precedents.

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Napoleon III, who's my favorite laughable proto-fascist presidentialist leader,

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did make a show of doing some things for the people in general, and did make a show.

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That was even more of a show, he made a show of having a foreign policy,

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which led him to no good end when he got involved with the Prussians.

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So he's maybe not very effective, Napoleon III.

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What's more important is Otto von Bismarck-Schönhausen,

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German-Prussian and then German Reich counselor for a very long time,

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presided over the unification of Germany by various military means,

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various means fair and foul.

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Having done that, wanted to then preserve the European peace,

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since he'd created a destabilizing large new state in the heart of Europe.

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And to the extent that it can be done, he was pretty good at trying to maintain the peace after he had achieved his goals.

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But in a change of his political front, he abandons in 1879 the National Liberals, whom he hadn't liked that much,

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and pursues an integrated program based on high tariffs, subsidies to industry,

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and the beginnings of the welfare state to cement the loyalties of the workers to the system,

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and to try to win them away from the Socialist Party, which is already a big factor, because there's universal manhood suffrage in Germany at this date, despite Mr. Rudy Rummel, who seems to think that this is not a factor in the German situation, there was universal manhood suffrage.

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And so this program can be viewed systematically, and I will here mention Mises as one of our historians of this system.

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Mises is certainly trained in historical method.

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Two of his first essays are empirical studies of the peasant question in Galicia

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and the child labor problem in his upper or lower, some part of Austria, child labor problem.

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And in Omnipotent Government, he goes into analysis of how he believes

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the welfare and the warfare parts of the Bismarckian system fit together.

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And I could give you the page references, but I don't have the book in front of me.

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But nonetheless, interesting analysis of the connection between militarism and welfarism in the German Reich.

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F. A. Hayek also addresses this problem in the Road to Serfdom for a chapter or two,

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the way in which real liberalism was squeezed out of the German political spectrum

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by a convergence of all of these socialists and militarists into social militarists.

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And next, much more recently, Ralph Reiko in his book Departite de Freiheit has described the welfare and warfare sides and the unity of this process in late 19th century Germany.

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The chapter on Friedrich Naumann, aside from being a total demolition of Naumann, is very illustrative of these winds of doctrine which Naumann sort of embodies.

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always going around calling himself a national social, which isn't quite, it's a step away

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from another term, national social. So that's interesting. Unfortunately, this book is so

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far only in German, but one of the, I think some of the essays are available in English

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and you might ask Professor Reiko about that. Now we turn to Britain in the late 19th century

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and there I will mention there's a series of books by Bernard Semmel and one of these is called

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Imperialism and Social Reform which is exactly what you'd expect and then there's one the rise

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of free trade imperialism and there's a recent one Semmel gets actually he's not each book doesn't

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seem to be as good as the previous book now he's come down to saying well there was an analysis of

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Imperialism by various writers.

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And gosh, it seems like you'd either have to accept

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the market economy or not accept it,

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but he'd rather have protectionism for some reason.

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So he's become a left protectionist, I don't know why.

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But this first book, Imperialism and Social Reform,

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is very good in discussing the coalescence

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between elements in the English political spectrum,

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which included the Fabians, people like Bernard Shaw

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and the ineffable Sidney and Beatrice Webb,

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who are having discussions with high Tories about how to build an efficient Britain,

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an organized, efficient, kind of militarized, but socially friendly British Empire.

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Joseph Chamberlain might be mentioned in the Milner Group in this connection,

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the Milner Group having just lately been reorganizing South Africa.

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So I had to have some experience.

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So you have the social imperialism everywhere, this kind of combination of nationalism and socialism,

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Now we turn to the United States and more historians.

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We too had people who were aware of the systematic relationship between the expansion of the state at home and abroad,

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and who were in fact social imperialists and social militarists.

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Unfortunately, we refer to them as reformers.

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We refer to these people as progressives.

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Teddy Roosevelt somehow comes to mind. I mean, here's the man who wants to wave his big stick and also bust the trusts and uplift the working men with tariffs, the high tariffs, which is the cause of American prosperity, all this sort of good stuff.

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And I have here a quote, if someone didn't liberate the book from me. Well, I had the quote.

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Oh, I'm sorry, I've got a photocopy. I'm just not paying attention.

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But a quote from John W. Burgess, who was a progressive, but like a lot of people, he had second thoughts.

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This is going around lately, second thoughts. You might look at my review of the Ronald Radosh book.

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And this is from his book, Reconciliation of Government with Liberty. Well, all I can say is good luck.

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But anyway, 1915, and he's disillusioned with Teddy Roosevelt.

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David Gordon tells me that Teddy was a former student of this fellow.

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Anyway, Burgess says this in 1915, the jingo.

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Okay, you know what jingos are. These are people that are always cheering for war.

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The jingo and the social reformer have gotten together and have formed a political party

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which threatened to capture the government and use it for the realization of their program of Caesaristic paternalism,

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a danger which now appears to have been averted only by the other parties

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having themselves adopted this program in a somewhat milder degree and form

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referring, I suppose, to Woodrow and such people

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all parties are now declaring themselves to be progressives

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and all mean in substance the same thing by this claim, namely

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the increase of governmental power over the constitutional immunities of the individual

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the solution by force of the problems of the social relations heretofore regulated by influence

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by Religion and Conscience, Charity and Human Feeling,

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The Substitution of the Club of the Policeman

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for the Crozier of the Priest,

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the Supercession of Education, Morals and Philanthropy

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by Administrative Ordinance.

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And of course, he's already mentioned the jingoism

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in foreign affairs.

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John W. Burgess, The Reconciliation of Government

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with Liberty, 1915.

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So he's a disillusioned progressive. He's having second thoughts anyway. So he's interesting. He's a contemporary critic of a mild one.

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Of Teddy Roosevelt, A. H. L. Mencken tended to say that he was crazier than the Kaiser. Kaiser Wilhelm II. He was our equivalent of the Kaiser.

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Now, there are a number of new left writers who reanalyzed the progressive era from the late 1950s,

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certainly into the 70s, before one or two of them had second thoughts and then their work isn't as good since then.

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But James Weinstein might be mentioned.

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These are largely the people grouped around William Apple Williams at the University of Wisconsin.

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and I'll just abbreviate W-A-W, this is William Appleman Williams, there's no problem spelling that, James Weinstein, Gabriel Kolko, he's sort of independent of them but he talks about the progressive era as a process of cartelization and he also writes books on foreign policy of imperialism so he knows the phenomena are related, oh see there's James W. Aikens, there's a number of these guys writing from this point of view so they're sort of in a way coming

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They're coming out of this camp here. They're the friendlier socialists who don't want to have an imperilous foreign policy.

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And so they're good critics because they can see the two halves and they're critical of the welfare state if only because it isn't socialism.

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And so they think it's an inadequate approach.

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Now, a contemporary critic I should have mentioned is William Graham Sumner, who wrote the famous essay, The Conquest of the United States by Spain.

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We're talking about the Progressive Era, we have to mention the Spanish-American War.

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So William Graham Sumner, contemporary critic.

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Okay, that's just to add drama.

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And Charles Baird actually, in 1939 in his America in Mid-Passage,

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looked back at the imperialist episode in the Spanish-American War and said,

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well, there might have been some profit in the China market and the foreign markets

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Walter Carp, a sort of an amateur historian, has an interesting book describing the origins of the Spanish-American War and World War I in the same book, which he regards as a complete departure from republican forms of government.

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and he puts most of the blame on the political parties and certainly they deserve a great deal of the blame.

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The two-party oligarchy as he likes to call it.

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There's also an interesting essay by Robert Zevin which I have the reference in the footnotes to my current article in JLS.

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Robert Zevin makes an interesting point that the jingos and the social reformers had always been together

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and notes that one consequence of the Spanish-American war was that we sent great hordes of bureaucrats, uplifters, social workers, and Yankee school marms to the Philippines to make up for killing off about 200,000 Filipinos during the so-called Philippine insurrection, so we were now going to heal them having gotten the discipline part out of the way. So it is a unified process. Many people were quite idealistic. People who weren't

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didn't think it was enough to go build settlement houses in New York City and uplift the poor there would go to the Philippines and uplift them so it's interesting okay World War I this should be passed over in decent silence but nonetheless it's awful World War I is the great high point for this stuff in other words there's a sort of gradual rise of status and you can have 1850s and there's a sudden spike with Abraham Lincoln levels off well never

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World War I is tremendous in terms of combining the welfare and the warfare state and expanding

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the state in both areas.

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And here the interesting thing is the debate between John Dewey, who is a horrible progressive

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and generally evil character, John Dewey, coming out of the post-millennial Protestant

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business again and then deciding to throw out the sentimental stuff about religion.

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So you have Dewey and of course he and all the other guys that hang around the Evil New

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Republic magazine, and I think I can call it evil without any debate here, like The

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War, they think The War is great and they see The War is a wonderful opportunity to

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implement their program.

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And almost their sole, one of their few critics is Randolph Byrne who wrote the famous essay

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The War and the Intellectuals trying to explore why these people should want the war and like

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the war and the way in which they thought it would help them realize their program,

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which it did.

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Now there was a myth spread in the decades there after World War I that none of the poor

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progressives they were reforming and uplifting and making society better and the war came

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came along and spoiled it.

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And reactionaries temporarily came into power because of the war and stopped all of these

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further reforms.

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Well, this might have been a position of a few people further to the left of the main

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body of progressives, but the progressives as such were pretty happy.

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The war, in fact, was the fulfillment of their program.

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And this, of course, is the title of a famous essay by Murray Rothbard in the Journal of

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of Libertarian Studies, which I don't have here, but I have references available.

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I can give it to anybody that wants it, and we have the JLSs in the library.

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Famous essay by Rothbard in which he says, well, this is a myth.

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Clearly, this was their opportunity.

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In fact, they're unhappy when the war is over because then things go back

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farewell to relative normalcy, to use that Republican word, and they're frustrated.

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And all the wartime planners like Baruch are waiting for a new crisis so they can

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and reintroduced corporatism and revived something like the War Industries Board in peacetime,

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which of course they get in the depression.

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Now, I should footnote this by saying that this whole process,

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we could sort of subsume this whole process

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under what Professor Gottfried calls the rise of the managerial,

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I can't read that really, but the managerial ideology

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or managerial practice, public administration,

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in which case we can create an interesting ideological link back to August Comte

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and the positivist is some of the first conscious ideologists

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of this lovely system.

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Okay, now forging ahead,

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we notice that Rothbard running through this whole discussion,

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of course, Rothbard seems to have a good essay

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or several on any period that we could discuss.

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So you can almost put together a book of these essays

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and have the real history of the recent century.

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Okay, well now we have the approach to World War II

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and of course the actuality of World War II,

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once it's approached and there it is.

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And there were a number of writers, of course,

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who spotted the welfare warfare state trend in World War II

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and John T. Flynn, who was a journalist of some merit

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and wrote on these things, not strictly a historian,

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but nonetheless quite interesting.

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John T. Flynn wrote a book called Country Squire in the White House.

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By the way, it's a mistake.

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A lot of these right-wingers like to say that Roosevelt was a traitor to his class.

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This isn't true.

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Roosevelt was not an industrial capitalist.

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Roosevelt was a member of the landed gentry, so you can almost see him as the kind of English

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Tory radical.

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He's got a social superiority over the capitalists, and so he can move to their left and in

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and convenience them with his policies.

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That might be the case.

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I think Forrest MacDonald sometimes

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entertains this notion about Roosevelt.

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So in 1940, he writes Country Squire in the White House.

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And he says the interesting thing is the New Deal is stalled.

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And to try to keep the economy going,

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they're resorting to military spending,

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trying to stimulate the economy.

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And he gives reasons why this might be.

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So again, the welfare and the warfare side's sort of meshing.

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and he thinks this is rather ominous.

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Now, of course, the war duly arrives and we're in the war.

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In 1944, he writes his most interesting book, perhaps,

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which is As We Go Marching,

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about how at the rate this war is proceeding,

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we'll come out of the war almost as fascist

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as some of the powers on the other side.

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Because of conscription, general climate of militarism,

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he already mentions a kind of imperialist psychology

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that's set in economic controls, which in his mind amount to a kind of corporative system and so forth, so it's a very interesting account.

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He kept writing this kind of stuff in the post-war period, which is why I think someone said he famously had a manuscript returned by William F. Buckley,

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who didn't want to hear all this sentimental stuff about how there could be too much military spending,

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So he didn't get published by National Review after that.

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Okay, so there's a number of critics during and just after the war.

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I'll mention also Garrett, who in the early 50s writes this pamphlet saying that we have crossed the threshold

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that lies between republic and empire.

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Very short, but interesting, pithy, odd style that he writes in a kind of a nomic style,

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kind of aphoristic or something saying that there are people who are waiting for the revolution that they think is coming and the revolution, I think he says, has already gone by.

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It went down the road some years ago singing Hoseannas to Freedom.

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The revolution within the forum had already occurred and we no longer had a republic and this, of course, was the work of the New Deal.

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Okay, of course also, and just after the war, Charles Beard, the great Charles Beard,

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the great progressive historian, and was writing critical books on Roosevelt's foreign policy

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just after the war, and dismissed as a senile old fool by the historical profession.

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Of course, Harry Elmer Barnes, a very feisty, and still something of a progressive, but hated the wars.

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Harry Labarnes, we kind of put him in this camp with the autarkic progressives, was writing at least putting together symposium, symposia against the war like perpetual war for perpetual peace, and from another quarter altogether, Charles Callan Tansel, sort of pro-confederate Catholic historian, also calling into question some aspects of Roosevelt's foreign policy, like the idea that they had no idea the Japanese might think of bombing Pearl Harbor,

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I don't remember if they expect the Japanese to bomb something else or, anyway, looking into that interesting problem, okay, now, there's an interesting body of literature on wartime planning, and you look at the literature on wartime planning, you see that, and this is while we're still an ally of dear old Uncle Joe, and people are assuming maybe we'll get along with this monster after the war, so there's not really an Uncle Joe problem yet, but they're already projecting

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huge amounts of American military spending, overseas bases, a virtual American empire without any reason.

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You know, you defeat the Axis enemy and it's supposed to be a better world.

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But they're already projecting this larger military and I tend to say, well,

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clearly this has something to do with what William F. Williams and his school refer to as open-door empire.

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That is this neo-mercantilist conception of trade in which the government goes out and beats down barriers to trade

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and hopes the capitalists and that's the only thing

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that will make the economy boom.

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Apparently the economy would collapse

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without this particular form of corporate welfare

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in the foreign trade sphere.

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So again, Akins and Williams and some other people

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contributed essays and a very interesting book

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called The Corporations and the Cold War

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edited by David Horowitz before he had his second thoughts

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and then he had too few, I think, in some ways.

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But that can happen, but now he would totally repudiate, I suppose, most of what he wrote, and yet he did a good deed by editing this book, because it tells us a lot in the essays about the wartime planning.

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There's also, Noam Chomsky has a short essay on this topic, and so does James J. Martin.

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Okay, but a really central essay is the one by Murray Rothbard.

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And this is on New Deal foreign economic policy,

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that is monetary policy, the foreign policy of a New Deal

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in relation to money.

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Remember we've gone off the gold standard,

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adopted basically a Keynesian model

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of how the economy has to be run.

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And now we want to be able to export our inflation.

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Dr. Hoppe talked about this whole thing yesterday.

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And there are certain powers that aren't cooperating.

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They're kind of bypassing the New York, London banking system,

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the Anglo-American banking system.

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And one of these fellows is Hitler, who says,

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well, these guys have rigged the international banking system

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against all of us aspiring powers,

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Oppressed Peoples and so forth.

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And so we're just going to bypass the credit system altogether.

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We're going to barter.

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So they say to the Bulgarians, well, we'll give you, you know,

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5,000 tons of shoes for 12,000 tons of potatoes or something.

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These big barter agreements sort of worked out.

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It's hard to believe they can be very economic.

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But nonetheless, it bypassed the credit markets.

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And this so angers the American administration.

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And they're also angry about Italian and German competition

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for Markets in Latin America, which is supposed to be our sphere of influence.

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By about 1938, they're seriously ready to go to war with these powers, and of course

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there is no war.

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The war hasn't broken out.

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I mean, war doesn't break out until September of 1939.

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These guys have already made the decision, basically, that if there's a war, they're

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going to be in it on the side of Britain.

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So that might be contingency planning, but you have to understand why they are thinking

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about this.

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I was a really military danger to the continental United States.

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They were saying, well, there's certain interests

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that we're pursuing.

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Same thing with Japan and the Pacific.

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We've had this delusion about the China market,

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you know, sell every Chinaman a pair of shoes

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and that's quite a few shoes.

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And so we don't like the Japanese carving out

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their sphere of influence in China

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because we've got our sphere of influence

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but that's different.

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Latin America is entirely different.

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Okay, so you could be cynical, I guess,

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or you can find it amusing. I think Dr. Higgs mentioned that.

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Okay, so the Rothbard essay is in a collection edited by James Martin and Leonard Ligio.

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This is about 1970s. I can't spell Ligio today.

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1976, called The Watershed of Empire.

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There are some copies in this library. I think it's out of print.

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The essay by Rothbard will be reprinted in a new book to be published by the Mises Institute, which is Rothbard's essays on monetary history.

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Okay, now there's a final sally about World War II.

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How did the other side see it? How did these guys, you know, the them, the status squared here, how did they see the relationship of warfare and welfare?

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Well, Harry Hopkins, FDR's great factotum and errand boy and general all-around advisor,

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Harry Hopkins said that World War II was a great crusade for the universal New Deal.

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Everyone should have the New Deal.

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And it was essentially the common man, and he was going to bring the common man the New

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Deal whether the common man wanted it or not, I guess.

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So it was a great crusade.

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So it is the universal New Deal.

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This is a theme that reappears in some of LBJ's speeches during the Vietnam War where

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where he keeps trying to tell a Viet Cong and North Vietnamese to lay down their arms

364
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because he wants to build them a TVA on the Mekong River Delta.

365
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And they'll be as happy as the people whose homes are sometimes flooded by TVA, or were, at one time.

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So I don't know, so there's an interesting, but it's perfect progressive thinking.

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You've got the welfare and the warfare elements inextricably intertwined.

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Okay, so now we fast forward to the Cold War. Oh wait, I've got to mention one more thing.

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A couple of interesting essays in the 70s by, I think it's John Garrity. I don't know if there's

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enough T's, he might have two T's, but I have the references if anybody wants it. And also an essay

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by William Luchtenberg, kind of talking about whether the New Deal was corporatist, you know,

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and whether it resembles any European systems in any fundamental way.

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This is what the old right critics all said in the 30s and 40s.

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They said, well, really, the New Deal is more like fascism in terms of economic policy than it is communism.

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Later on in the Cold War, it became convenient to say, well, it's communism rather than fascism.

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So there was an interesting structural implication.

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And what's interesting is that I think in the Lechtenberg's article in the American Historical Review,

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He has some pictures and there's some discussion of the WPA and all the guys marching around with shovels to plant trees and they're sort of in military formation and it reminds me of a certain film made in Germany in the 30s where the guys are marching around in uniform and they have uniforms on and military drill but they're all they're going to do is plant trees so it's very nice, it's welfare, it's sort of ecologically nice but they're in uniform for some reason and have a military structure

379
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The Cold War was prevalent because the Cold War had no apparent end. The Cold War really was a sort of perpetual war for perpetual peace that Harry Elmer Barnes talked about.

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I mean, there's no telling when it might end, and it became a great kind of Manichaean cosmic struggle at the level of ideology and everything.

381
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And again, blown out of proportion to any actual threats, people have compared the things that these generals said in private to what they said in public.

382
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I think there's a famous thing about Lucius Clay, I believe it was, saying that the Soviets might roll into Western Europe next week.

383
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and they asked him later why he said that and he said,

384
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well, you know, we needed the appropriation

385
00:36:17.100 --> 00:36:20.320
and my superiors needed me to say something inflammatory.

386
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So this sort of thing happened all the time.

387
00:36:23.860 --> 00:36:26.900
So the whole thing is blown entirely out of proportion.

388
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One could argue in fact that poor Stalin,

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this horrible monster Stalin, such as he was,

390
00:36:33.940 --> 00:36:37.140
was really not in the best shape to roll over anything.

391
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I mean, they'd rolled into Eastern Europe

392
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in the course of defeating the other people, the other side.

393
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And, but this is an exhausted country with virtually no economy.

394
00:36:48.200 --> 00:36:51.200
It's taken enormous casualties in the course of the war.

395
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Not leaving aside the enormous casualties already inflicted by Stalin himself

396
00:36:56.200 --> 00:36:59.700
before the war on the Russians and Ukrainian people.

397
00:36:59.700 --> 00:37:03.200
They needed a break. Stalin wanted to rebuild his economy such as it was.

398
00:37:03.200 --> 00:37:07.200
And he's begging for Western loans. Now, a lot of people think this is a soft position.

399
00:37:07.200 --> 00:37:11.700
My attitude is we should have loaned him the money and he might have,

400
00:37:11.700 --> 00:37:16.780
I don't know if this would have rendered him peaceful, but the idea that we'd waste the money is that there's no point in worrying about that.

401
00:37:16.780 --> 00:37:21.780
Consider all the other money we wasted, the much larger sums of money, we might as well have tried that.

402
00:37:21.780 --> 00:37:24.780
And since they've already got the money anyway, they've already taken the money from the people,

403
00:37:24.780 --> 00:37:29.080
they might as well try this policy, that doesn't work, then they can have a crusade and militarize everything.

404
00:37:29.080 --> 00:37:34.280
They might as well have, because wasting money can hardly be an argument in this context.

405
00:37:34.280 --> 00:37:43.280
So the Cold War was perfect, because the Cold War was the perfect fusion of the welfare and the warfare state.

406
00:37:43.280 --> 00:37:51.280
Everything was for the Cold War. You want school lunches? Well, you have to have healthy people to win the Cold War.

407
00:37:51.280 --> 00:37:55.280
You want physical education? Well, you have to be able to do more push-ups than Ivan.

408
00:37:55.280 --> 00:38:09.280
Okay, you want integration? Well, we have to integrate so that the nice non-aligned third world despotisms and dictatorships and hellholes will like us better and not become aligned with the Soviets.

409
00:38:09.280 --> 00:38:21.280
You want any possible policy? You want big highways? Well, you have to build the interstate highway system, another interesting leveling, centralizing process based on the autobahns apparently.

410
00:38:21.280 --> 00:38:28.280
Well, we have to have those. We're going to have to move the troops around on these interstate highways when the communists come ashore at Pismo Beach.

411
00:38:28.280 --> 00:38:32.280
You don't know, and Bugs Bunny can't defend the place by himself.

412
00:38:32.280 --> 00:38:37.280
So everything can be justified. So you had this sort of false social consensus.

413
00:38:37.280 --> 00:38:43.280
Everything was thrown in the hopper. You need more education? Well, it'll be a defense education bill.

414
00:38:43.280 --> 00:38:50.280
Whatever it could have been. You know, you want better shoes? Well, there'll be a defense shoe bill. It was endless.

415
00:38:50.280 --> 00:39:00.840
And of course, this brings us to the military and industrial, some people say Congressional complex.

416
00:39:00.840 --> 00:39:05.400
And this is quite interesting. By the way, I would mention that the committee chairman referred to,

417
00:39:05.400 --> 00:39:11.480
tended to be Southerners because of their longevity on the committees and the one party system.

418
00:39:11.480 --> 00:39:15.760
I would tend in my present position to think of them as maybe Scalawags in some way,

419
00:39:15.760 --> 00:39:17.760
but we don't need to go into that.

420
00:39:17.760 --> 00:39:27.160
Anyway, so you have this huge complex that even Eisenhower complained about as he was leaving office.

421
00:39:27.160 --> 00:39:31.360
And a number of analysts talked about this, and I'll mention them before I...

422
00:39:31.360 --> 00:39:33.960
How am I doing on time? Okay.

423
00:39:33.960 --> 00:39:41.660
Well, as I understand it, the infamous National Security Council Memo 68 has actually finally been...

424
00:39:41.660 --> 00:39:47.780
It was declassified sometime in the late 70s, so we certainly could look at that.

425
00:39:47.780 --> 00:39:52.580
C. Wright Mills, although he was a bit undisciplined in his rhetoric at times,

426
00:39:52.580 --> 00:39:57.980
had a lot to say about the Cold War and talked about crackpot realism, as Dr. Higgs pointed out,

427
00:39:57.980 --> 00:40:00.820
had a book called The Causes of World War III.

428
00:40:00.820 --> 00:40:04.940
And in fact, he's one of the few people in the whole period in his Causes of World War III,

429
00:40:04.940 --> 00:40:08.140
which was regarded as the dangerous leftist book,

430
00:40:08.140 --> 00:40:16.140
One of the few people to actually criticize terror bombing, which had been done in Korea on the model of the World War II bombing.

431
00:40:16.140 --> 00:40:19.140
One of the few people, I think, Richard Weaver.

432
00:40:19.140 --> 00:40:23.140
Otherwise it's a couple of maverick conservatives that complain about terror bombing.

433
00:40:23.140 --> 00:40:25.140
Felix Marley, people like that.

434
00:40:25.140 --> 00:40:27.140
So Mills is interesting.

435
00:40:27.140 --> 00:40:31.140
Again, William Apple Williams, as a critic of this emerging system,

436
00:40:31.140 --> 00:40:36.140
which he refers to as corporate syndicalism combined with the open door empire.

437
00:40:36.140 --> 00:40:42.040
Of course, Rothbard is developing his critique in this period and so forth.

438
00:40:42.040 --> 00:40:44.840
There's a political scientist named Howard Wiarda.

439
00:40:44.840 --> 00:40:47.840
I looked at a mountain of this literature on corporatism,

440
00:40:47.840 --> 00:40:49.440
and all these writers, they're political scientists.

441
00:40:49.440 --> 00:40:51.140
They don't want to give the Americans any corporatism.

442
00:40:51.140 --> 00:40:54.240
They say, oh, no, it's not corporatism because you don't have a pillarized

443
00:40:54.240 --> 00:40:59.940
and pelletized and organized system like they have in the Netherlands or Sweden.

444
00:40:59.940 --> 00:41:01.740
So you can't call it, you have corporatism.

445
00:41:01.740 --> 00:41:05.040
It's just a bunch of pluralistic intervention.

446
00:41:05.040 --> 00:41:09.720
And this is why, what was your term, quasi-corporatism?

447
00:41:09.720 --> 00:41:11.680
So they say it's a loose corporatism.

448
00:41:11.680 --> 00:41:15.120
Well, fine, but what we are does, one of the few exceptions,

449
00:41:15.120 --> 00:41:17.680
he says, well, there was loose corporatism,

450
00:41:17.680 --> 00:41:19.640
but under Eisenhower,

451
00:41:19.640 --> 00:41:21.760
because Republicans are a little friendlier,

452
00:41:21.760 --> 00:41:23.840
they have different business interests in their corner

453
00:41:23.840 --> 00:41:25.280
than the Democrats do.

454
00:41:25.280 --> 00:41:28.520
Under Eisenhower, he believes there's a sudden period

455
00:41:28.520 --> 00:41:31.480
of galloping corporatism in the framework

456
00:41:31.480 --> 00:41:33.640
of the Cold War system.

457
00:41:33.640 --> 00:41:41.280
So we do have some, apparently, these cozy deals with defense contractors and subsidiary contractors and so on,

458
00:41:41.280 --> 00:41:53.140
which certainly would distort markets and all sorts of things you might complain about in this government-business partnership.

459
00:41:53.140 --> 00:42:02.040
Okay. And there was a nursing paper from the early 1970s by Robert Bresler, reprinted,

460
00:42:02.040 --> 00:42:07.040
Again, a Political Scientist reprinted in the collection edited by Kenneth Templeton.

461
00:42:09.640 --> 00:42:16.240
What is that? A Politicization of Society, about 1977, Institute for Human Studies,

462
00:42:16.240 --> 00:42:25.540
has essays by John Lukash, Murray Rothbard, Bill Marina, all sorts of people, too numerous to remember.

463
00:42:25.540 --> 00:42:29.940
But has this, I think the piece by Bresler has been reprinted in there about the rise of the executive state,

464
00:42:29.940 --> 00:42:35.180
Again, exactly paralleling the arguments of people like Ben Creffold and Bruce Porter,

465
00:42:35.180 --> 00:42:41.940
the executive playing a more important role in this system.

466
00:42:41.940 --> 00:42:46.460
Okay, well then the Soviets had the bad manners to collapse.

467
00:42:46.460 --> 00:42:53.140
Took away our enemy. There's no Soviets anymore and there's this sort of frantic substitute truce.

468
00:42:53.140 --> 00:42:59.420
The search for substitute enemies had some success, not much.

469
00:42:59.420 --> 00:43:02.180
And it leads us back to some interesting observations,

470
00:43:02.180 --> 00:43:05.220
and here I'll mention two writers

471
00:43:05.220 --> 00:43:07.420
who are in favor of the welfare warfare state,

472
00:43:07.420 --> 00:43:09.940
or at least they're in favor of the welfare part,

473
00:43:09.940 --> 00:43:13.260
so they're willing to put up with the warfare part.

474
00:43:13.260 --> 00:43:15.260
And these are these political scientists,

475
00:43:15.260 --> 00:43:17.300
I think it's, I've got the reference,

476
00:43:17.300 --> 00:43:18.420
I can't remember the guy's first name,

477
00:43:18.420 --> 00:43:22.940
but it's Dudney and Eikenberry.

478
00:43:24.100 --> 00:43:25.260
And they wrote an interesting article

479
00:43:25.260 --> 00:43:29.420
on Foreign Policy in 1994.

480
00:43:29.420 --> 00:43:32.220
Foreign Policy is a journal that's competing now

481
00:43:32.220 --> 00:43:35.120
with foreign affairs, it's only a few years old.

482
00:43:35.120 --> 00:43:38.140
And in 1994, they wrote this article

483
00:43:38.140 --> 00:43:40.100
called After the Long War.

484
00:43:40.100 --> 00:43:41.380
And they're saying in effect,

485
00:43:41.380 --> 00:43:43.180
oh, it's awful, it's horrible.

486
00:43:43.180 --> 00:43:44.500
Cold War is over.

487
00:43:44.500 --> 00:43:46.580
We can't justify all these programs.

488
00:43:46.580 --> 00:43:49.560
Why, we could sneak in five social programs a week before

489
00:43:49.560 --> 00:43:50.940
because of the Cold War.

490
00:43:50.940 --> 00:43:53.860
And suddenly this wonderful consensus is gone.

491
00:43:53.860 --> 00:43:58.300
And will the presidency weaken? Will the central government wither?

492
00:43:58.300 --> 00:44:00.300
Why, it's just a horrible prospect for them.

493
00:44:00.300 --> 00:44:02.420
So of course I thought this was wonderful

494
00:44:02.420 --> 00:44:04.260
and I use it as a basis of one of my columns,

495
00:44:04.260 --> 00:44:06.740
you know, saying this is a happy prospect.

496
00:44:06.740 --> 00:44:09.580
If it ever works out that way, I'll buy these guys a bear.

497
00:44:09.580 --> 00:44:11.100
And so far it hasn't really gotten very far

498
00:44:11.100 --> 00:44:13.760
because the state has found other ways

499
00:44:13.760 --> 00:44:15.980
to justify its existence.

500
00:44:15.980 --> 00:44:18.860
And this leads us to the Gottfriedian problem

501
00:44:18.860 --> 00:44:22.820
that possibly the state, indeed having grown up

502
00:44:22.820 --> 00:44:27.580
All this welfareism and statism at home, having grown up, kind of written piggyback on the

503
00:44:27.580 --> 00:44:33.780
war process, perhaps it has transcended the military origins, and Bruce Porter mentions

504
00:44:33.780 --> 00:44:38.340
this possibility in his book that possibly the state has now transcended the military

505
00:44:38.340 --> 00:44:42.220
origins, people are used to it.

506
00:44:42.220 --> 00:44:47.940
And this is, of course, what Professor Gottfried worries about, and Martin Van Creffeld might

507
00:44:47.940 --> 00:44:49.340
be too optimistic about.

508
00:44:49.340 --> 00:44:52.840
I have a quote in this connection.

509
00:44:52.840 --> 00:44:57.100
Now this is an old right industrialist, earnest wearer.

510
00:44:57.100 --> 00:45:03.740
He was a president of U.S. Steel, I think that's the company, U.S. Steel Company, and

511
00:45:03.740 --> 00:45:05.860
he says this in 1951.

512
00:45:05.860 --> 00:45:11.300
He says, as it is, we hear too little from our leadership that is positive and constructive.

513
00:45:11.300 --> 00:45:15.660
We are told that we must prepare to endure five to 10 to 20 years of tension.

514
00:45:15.660 --> 00:45:21.660
That means it would have been over in 1971. That would have been nicer.

515
00:45:21.660 --> 00:45:27.660
20 years of tension, of expanding government and government costs, of widening government controls,

516
00:45:27.660 --> 00:45:32.660
of high taxes, of military service for our youth, of a Garrison State economy.

517
00:45:32.660 --> 00:45:40.660
Think what this will mean. It will mean the end, by the end of 20 years, if it does end then,

518
00:45:40.660 --> 00:45:46.660
We will have had two whole generations of Americans who have never had the opportunity to know the real America.

519
00:45:46.660 --> 00:45:49.660
They will have no experience with the real individual independence.

520
00:45:49.660 --> 00:45:53.660
That may just can't be great, but on the contrary, they will accept as an accustomed thing,

521
00:45:53.660 --> 00:45:59.660
the detailed control over their private lives by a powerful central government.

522
00:45:59.660 --> 00:46:04.660
Well, I think that was an interesting warning, all too true.

523
00:46:04.660 --> 00:46:12.660
So my final comment is simply that rather than protecting us from Hobbes' war of all against all,

524
00:46:12.660 --> 00:46:19.660
the welfare-warfare state produces it and produces as much of it as we will put up with.

525
00:46:19.660 --> 00:46:36.260
Unless I just missed it, you did not mention the GI Bill.

526
00:46:36.260 --> 00:46:48.460
Oh, it's in my notes and I just sometimes you just skip over something, but that's an important welfare aspect that's tied to the military thing and it seems to me that it's a great illustration of the whole process, yes.

527
00:46:48.460 --> 00:46:52.460
Did you read Tom DiLorenzo's piece, The Truth About the G.I. Bill?

528
00:46:52.460 --> 00:46:54.460
No, but I will.

529
00:46:54.460 --> 00:46:58.460
I can see it would fit very nicely into this whole thing.

530
00:46:58.460 --> 00:47:01.460
Anyone else?

531
00:47:01.460 --> 00:47:05.460
Yeah, I guess it means we're in complete agreement.

532
00:47:05.460 --> 00:47:08.460
We can leave early.

533
00:47:08.460 --> 00:47:10.460
Yes.

534
00:47:10.460 --> 00:47:19.460
I want to go back to Gareth, because I think on many of us at that time, he was a very strong influence.

535
00:47:19.460 --> 00:47:27.460
He was a well-known journalist in style. I thought this trilogy that he wrote, and he did campus...

536
00:47:27.460 --> 00:47:32.460
Yeah, put together as the... and then put together as the People's Potage.

537
00:47:32.460 --> 00:47:39.460
And John Birch Society has kept this thing in print forever, so it's actually a good thing they've done there.

538
00:47:39.460 --> 00:47:53.960
But the people's prodigy implies that, well, the American people have sold their fundamental independence and their local self-government and so forth for the illusion of security or maybe even sometimes some real security, but nonetheless he thinks it's a bad, bad trade.

539
00:47:53.960 --> 00:48:08.460
And the essays are entitled, see, The Revolution Was, which is his analysis of how the New Deal came and made this revolution within the political form, somewhat like Octavian keeping out the republican forms in Rome.

540
00:48:08.460 --> 00:48:19.460
The Revolution was, let's see, yeah, ex-America, continuing these themes, and then the Empire one, but the exact, what's the exact title of the Empire essay?

541
00:48:20.460 --> 00:48:33.460
Rise of Empire? Yeah, Rise of Empire. So it's tied together. Here we have the analysis of the increasing state power in terms of dispensing welfare and comfort, but also in terms of foreign entanglements.

542
00:48:33.460 --> 00:48:42.460
He makes the excellent point that as strong as Roosevelt was with his backing in Congress and so forth,

543
00:48:42.460 --> 00:48:46.460
he had a hell of a time trying to commit the country to an unpopular war.

544
00:48:46.460 --> 00:48:54.460
A few years later, an unpopular president, Harry Truman, without so much as asking, you know,

545
00:48:54.460 --> 00:49:00.460
buy your leave, committed this to a war in Korea and somehow didn't get impeached.

546
00:49:00.460 --> 00:49:30.460
So Garrett thought this showed that the institutional damage was quite great by 1950 and he's also got a very interesting discussion of the relationship between Congress and the military and military spending, how it will tend to go up and you can frighten Congress into spending all this money later on it became business as usual based on this insider beltway exchange of ideas at the public expense.

547
00:49:30.460 --> 00:49:41.460
So I'm trying to think what else I can say. So he's an interesting old right guy. I think he's probably a mild protectionist, but then you had a little bit of that on the old right.

548
00:49:41.460 --> 00:49:49.460
But he's very forthright on the notion that Republican government is being stolen out from under us, and this is a tragedy, and people are losing their independence.

549
00:49:49.460 --> 00:50:00.460
He'd written some novels in the 20s, which I won't go into, but about some of these themes of free enterprise versus social reformers, yes.

550
00:50:00.460 --> 00:50:08.460
I was going to say, in earlier work, he actually advocated total cut-off of all foreign trade to prevent foreign entanglement.

551
00:50:08.460 --> 00:50:14.960
You know, the wars followed, you know, foreign trade, and there were really convincing arguments.

552
00:50:14.960 --> 00:50:21.960
So he's sort of like an autarkic capitalist, so we could put him partly in this camp then, I guess, okay, with the autarkic. That's interesting.

553
00:50:21.960 --> 00:50:23.960
I don't know if that was always his view, but it looks like that.

554
00:50:23.960 --> 00:50:30.960
It looks to me as though later on he became only, he became a mild protectionist as opposed to an autarkist.

555
00:50:30.960 --> 00:50:43.960
But very interesting figure who writes with this kind of autonomic style, it's hard to replicate, but has an interesting rhythm, kind of hypnotic kind of read.

556
00:50:43.960 --> 00:51:12.560
One thing you might think of, could you discuss the role of the foundation for economic education and fee and let it read in regard to combining free-form economics with anonimic invention as far as policy?

557
00:51:13.960 --> 00:51:30.960
That's it. Rothbard and a small number of other people on the same side. That is, in this camp, the camp that does combine laissez-faire liberalism and a peaceful foreign policy, I certainly should mention Reed.

558
00:51:30.960 --> 00:51:40.960
In fact, he had a number of famous pamphlets from that period that Rothbard quoted in his polemics against the Cold War right-wingers later. So we have Leonard Reed.

559
00:51:40.960 --> 00:51:50.960
And I guess most of this group around fiat, or very many of them, continued the old right orientation in foreign policy.

560
00:51:50.960 --> 00:52:00.960
And they like to point out things like high military spending would tend to produce inflation,

561
00:52:00.960 --> 00:52:06.460
or inflation would be used to fund some of this or be ulcerative economic consequences,

562
00:52:06.460 --> 00:52:09.460
and the markets would become increasingly regulated and so forth.

563
00:52:09.460 --> 00:52:25.460
What were your theories in the pre-call for a professional committee and subject to this very nasty interrogation? Did that happen? Did you shut down all pre-interviews for the United States before all of this?

564
00:52:25.460 --> 00:52:30.460
I don't see in the early days of shorter office before they talked about it.

565
00:52:39.460 --> 00:52:54.460
I don't know the date, I just would assume it's in the mid-50s, but it could be earlier.

566
00:52:54.460 --> 00:53:04.460
I should mention somebody else, again in this respect, a couple of these guys are entirely hardcore.

567
00:53:04.460 --> 00:53:20.460
And this has to do with Frank Chodorow, whose newsletter analysis with a small a was started, I think, in 1944 and continued into at least 1951.

568
00:53:20.460 --> 00:53:23.460
This is one of the places where Rothbard was first published.

569
00:53:23.460 --> 00:53:30.460
Rothbard reviewed Human Action in this little four-page, big, big pages like newspaper size and so on.

570
00:53:30.460 --> 00:53:35.460
And he was always a hardcore isolationist, anti-interventionist.

571
00:53:35.460 --> 00:53:41.460
And the other publication, Human Events, which has gone through some changes,

572
00:53:41.460 --> 00:53:45.460
Human Events, founded again in the last part of the war,

573
00:53:45.460 --> 00:53:51.460
and then succumbing to Cold War ideology by about 1953,

574
00:53:51.460 --> 00:53:54.460
well, maybe a little bit later, but succumbing to the Cold War point of view.

575
00:53:54.460 --> 00:54:02.860
But here you had Felix Morley and Frank Chudorov carrying on the same fight.

576
00:54:02.860 --> 00:54:06.260
And on the left you had, correspondingly on the left, you had politics,

577
00:54:06.260 --> 00:54:11.460
a strange journal called Politics on the left to kind of pro-peace,

578
00:54:11.460 --> 00:54:15.060
where C. Wright Mills and Dwight MacDonald are a number of people, yes.

579
00:54:15.060 --> 00:54:18.740
The question is, how did some of these people end up as friends of Bill Buckley?

580
00:54:18.740 --> 00:54:24.340
He showed her off with his friend Buckley, and Buckley wrote this very fashionable literary.

581
00:54:24.340 --> 00:54:29.140
In contrast, the very nasty words that he wrote about Murray Rothbard.

582
00:54:29.140 --> 00:54:31.940
Ah, Buckley, yes.

583
00:54:31.940 --> 00:54:37.140
How did he get that friendship? How did he form, and how did he make it?

584
00:54:37.140 --> 00:54:39.300
Okay, well, my friend of mine has a theory about this.

585
00:54:39.300 --> 00:54:42.500
A friend of mine who's a lawyer, who got sick of being a lawyer,

586
00:54:42.500 --> 00:55:06.500
He says in a way he thinks that Albert J. Nock had two disciples. One of them took the aristocratic pose from Nock, and I guess who that might be, and the other took the real ideology. That would be Chotarov, but maybe it's the connection to Nock that made it possible.

587
00:55:06.500 --> 00:55:09.800
or maybe Buckley's immense charm.

588
00:55:09.800 --> 00:55:14.500
I've always thought it would be an amazing visual spectacle to have him interview Mick Jagger.

589
00:55:14.500 --> 00:55:22.100
There'd be a war of tongues on the television, but nonetheless, maybe it's his charm, yes.

590
00:55:22.100 --> 00:55:42.100
The guy who was the facilitator of the change in human events from his older right to his

591
00:55:42.100 --> 00:55:46.100
We're not even a good disciple, then, at this point.

592
00:55:46.100 --> 00:55:56.100
The guy who was the facilitator of the change in human events from its own right ownership to a new right ownership of the William J. Casey,

593
00:55:56.100 --> 00:56:02.100
who was this man's later CIA director, was a lawyer who appropriated actions for him.

594
00:56:02.100 --> 00:56:05.100
Now he's controlling his internal affairs.

595
00:56:05.100 --> 00:56:08.100
Yes, I wouldn't find that suspicious.

596
00:56:08.100 --> 00:56:11.100
Interesting, fascinating.

597
00:56:11.100 --> 00:56:22.100
In the blue book of the John Birch Society, Welsh, when was that published, the blue book?

598
00:56:22.100 --> 00:56:23.100
1958.

599
00:56:23.100 --> 00:56:28.100
He was reading, I remember reading that at the height of when the communists were there,

600
00:56:28.100 --> 00:56:33.100
Nick of Rockman said, oh boy, he's got it so wrong, and actually he got it so right.

601
00:56:33.100 --> 00:56:39.100
He was saying that the Soviets had baby as a slave empire, no way were they ever going

602
00:56:39.100 --> 00:56:52.100
Are they ever going to attack us? Because when they did, the slave nations would rise up against them and that the danger was in Washington, D.C. and he laid that out very beautifully.

603
00:56:52.100 --> 00:56:56.100
And as I say, I was so sure he was wrong back then.

604
00:56:56.100 --> 00:57:07.100
Well, that was the problem with Welch. He had a couple of points he clung to and would make all the time that were obviously not right.

605
00:57:07.100 --> 00:57:11.540
so it was easy for Buckley to purge him from the coalition but then he didn't

606
00:57:11.540 --> 00:57:16.500
but the Berkshires didn't have this real kind of desire to get out of Vietnam, Lew.

607
00:57:16.500 --> 00:57:19.500
I was going to say that's of course why Buckley purged them.

608
00:57:19.500 --> 00:57:21.500
Yeah, they had this latent isolationism.

609
00:57:21.500 --> 00:57:24.500
You know, you mentioned the Eisenhower business and so forth.

610
00:57:24.500 --> 00:57:30.500
It's actually Welch's criticism of the war in Vietnam that is the reason for Buckley wanting to get rid of them.

611
00:57:30.500 --> 00:57:32.500
Yeah, I'm sure this.

612
00:57:32.500 --> 00:57:35.500
I wrote in my book on conservative movement for a long time,

613
00:57:35.500 --> 00:57:40.000
which I'm going to be dedicating to David Gordon here,

614
00:57:40.000 --> 00:57:46.000
about the break-with between Pockley and the John Burt Society,

615
00:57:46.000 --> 00:57:48.000
and indeed it is openly one that you've known.

616
00:57:48.000 --> 00:57:50.000
Oh, yeah.

617
00:57:50.000 --> 00:57:52.000
That makes perfectly good sense, because again,

618
00:57:52.000 --> 00:57:56.000
they're really closer to this position than that position.

619
00:57:58.000 --> 00:58:02.000
Well, I suppose that's sufficient then.

620
00:58:02.000 --> 00:58:07.000
Unless there's one more? Okay. Well, we all agree then, more or less.